An easier fear, the kind that laughs with him. The kind of comfortable fear that spits blood in the dirt with his mouth and makes his magic tremble between his ribs. The kind of fear he calls rage when he dreams. The kind of fear that drives him into the woods with a death wish. The kind of fear he can handle.
So he goes, when it's dark and the dark is a hand around his throat, squeezing. He goes and he laughs and he squares his shoulders against beasts and when he has had his fill his magic rolls its eyes and calls the game, and when Andras' head hits the ground he is still laughing, just not the mad, drunk kind of laughter. He cannot tell if the ache in him is the bone-deep bruises or wild magic sizzling over his skin and belching smoke or if it is something else entirely, something he doesn't want to touch.
The fear does not leave him, not when his head hits the ground, and not when he wakes, a week later, and pain floods him so fast it makes him dizzy.
His room is dark, except for an oil lamp on the table, with a flickering glow warped by the bulb of the glass. It is the king of dark that sits in his bones and sucks out the marrow. It is the kind of dark that hunches over his shoulders and digs its thumbs in each bruise laid over his back, or his ribs, or his neck. Outside the wind is blowing hard enough that it rattles the window. There is a storm coming and Andras wonders if Oriens is mocking him.
It is always so quiet without the electric hum of his magic. He hates days like this, in the aftermath of ruin, when he is drained of all strength and there is nothing to say yes so loud he can't hear himself think.
His mother would say that he screams because the quiet scares him. He has never really thought it was true until now, in the dark and the unholy silence, when there is something in him that keeps asking him why and he can't find the answer. Why? Why? Why? But he always comes back to a morning in Solterra and that fear with his heart in its fist.
Why? Because it is all he ever thinks about.
Why? Because it is like being in hell. Because it is like ice has inched its way into his lungs and he can't breathe, can't think--and the genuine, physical pain he feels when he breathes does not mask it the way that it should.
Why? Because it is new. Because it is terrifying. Because it is fear compounding on fear until he has driven himself mad.
Why?
Because when there is a knock on the door, in the quiet where there should have been magic, rumbling like thunder, there is only a voice that says I hope--
promise I'll be kind, but I won't stop until that boy is mine, baby, you'll be famous, chase you down until you love me
I don’t care about him; I don’t care about him at all.
I really don’t. The amount I think about him is nothing more than morbid curiosity, like the desire one has to identify a type of roadkill. When I think of him, it stirs something in my heart—a kind of tight, intent pressure building in the chest—that distracts me for the rest of the night, sends me spiraling into the cool-dark, but it’s not because I miss him or want him or think about him at all. It just happens. It’s always clinical.
Clinical or not, though, it bothers the shit out of me. I hate him. I mean—I don’t care about him, but I hate him. He’s a water stain. A patch of mold in the brain stem. My focus is shot. And despite my best efforts everyone has noticed—Corradh, Miriam, even Adonai give me looks that say they think they know just what’s wrong with me. I can’t do anything, think anything, want anything without him making an appearance, and it ruins me, my days, my nights, everything in between.
He has even started making an appearance in my dreams. Often my dreams are dark, sultry things, where the sky is painted red and gold and the sun shines down like spears; my dream-self spends an inordinate amount of time in my family’s courtyard, indulging the hedonistic whims that make my stomach turn, knocking down dates from the trees, drinking wine, kissing pretty boys I won’t even think about next week. All of this is realistic enough.
What makes me itch is that every time I have these dreams, they are inevitably interrupted. A fork of blue lightning rises out of the pool. A knock sounds heavy on the door, and I know deep in my heart (and with a twinge of nausea) it is him. His face appears in the still surface of our ponds, or in the hot quicksilver of my bathroom mirror, there-but-not like the ghosts I’ve been trying to avoid. Every time I fall asleep, something in the dreamscape gives away and cracks, and I’m tossed without ceremony from the part of my brain that used to be peaceful and into the stomach-churningly agitated sea of my heart.
When I wake up it always feels like I’m falling and falling and falling.
I don’t care about him. I really don’t. But I think I would do nearly anything to dispose of this feeling—the prickle of agitation, the constant swelling of anxiety that follows when I look around every corner and expect to see him—and I know there is a way to fix it. I know, too, that it might make me look weak. And that the Warden will be incapable of making it at all pleasant. (Although that’s not much of a difference, is it? He can never make things easy. For either of us.)
I don’t care about him, but when I knock at his door, something in me can’t help twisting and twisting and twisting. My stomach is in self-contained knots. Tonight the moon is a thin sliver, the sky a deep blue filmed with clouds; a breeze ruffles my tail; I stand in front of the door in silence for a few moments before I dare to raise my touch to it, and when I do the wood is cold as a gravestone.
rage is not beautiful.
it is the ugly head of a rabid animal
foaming at the mouth,
worms in its heart.
It would be easier, in the short term, to go back to sleep– he knows this. Somehow the worst outcome is knowing
Andras rises in a pained but deliberate motion, regarding the door with some vague sense of apprehension.
(There is a room with two doors.
Behind one is the lady: beautiful, soft, smiling. She laughs when you joke and coos when you call her beautiful. Someone tells you that your life will be full of light, with baskets of apples to slice into pieces until apples are all you can see, think, smell, taste.
The other door hides a tiger, crouched in the tall grass, mouth full of teeth and fire. When it purrs it sounds like rolling thunder. It has been hungry as long as it has lived and now it is ravenous.
Someone asks you: which door do you choose? There is no way of knowing– there is no way to see but to act.)
The door doesn’t creak as he pulls it open. There is just the gentle rush of wind, the moulding edged like sharp knives in the yellow glow of his lantern, and Pilate. (Which is he? – Andras doesn’t know.) Pilate doesn’t wait to say ‘Warden.’ Andras is shocked by the silence that follows, a hollow space where there should have been small cracks of thunder, or the quiet whff of books pulled from shelf after shelf, day in and day out. Why is Pilate here? Why is Pilate here now?
Andras’ mouth twitches, something close to a smile if there wasn’t ice cold dread pouring out of his head down his neck and his legs and his back. He is thinking whyisPilatehere? so fast that the words lose their meaning, just a panicked jumble of sounds. Sometimes he dreams Pilate’s cloak floating behind as he walks up the stairs. Sometimes he dreams the short but impossibly long flight home. Usually these are nightmares.
But he is here. Andras did not have to crawl back to Solterra on his bruised and bloodied knees. Andras did not have to grovel and whimper– though he tried.
No, rather the prince came to him–Andras smiles like he’s not sure if he’s won or he’s lost. Is Pilate the lady, or the tiger? Which would Andras prefer?
“Pilate,” he says, fluctuating wildly between relief and panic every half-second. Before he can ask what are you doing Andras steps out of the way and invites the man in. The room is not cramped with the two of them in it but close enough: the single desk pushed against the far wall to make room for the bed of pillows, the low shelf perpendicular to it, and the surfaces cluttered with parchment and discarded pens. It is clearly an organized chaos, on further inspection–each book is wedged wherever it can fit but carefully stacked from one to the other, the pillows are tucked neatly against each other so that there is no daylight between them, the corners are free of cobwebs and the single windowsill is bereft of dust.
“After you. Sorry, about the space,” he says, “and— everything.” Andras’ smile widens, for a moment that flickers like candlelight and then dies away just as fast. He steps away from the door and the wind rushes back out and the finality of the action is alarming to say the least.
promise I'll be kind, but I won't stop until that boy is mine, baby, you'll be famous, chase you down until you love me
My heart stops when he opens the door; a sharp sting runs straight through me horizontally, and in places where my skin feels like it’s stretched too tight, silk over bone, I can feel my blood run cold.
He looks ridiculous. I want to be dismissive of him and I think I almost am. From this close I can see the way his eyes widen incrementally in surprise, how his mouth twitches in something that is not exactly a smile when I glance at that snow-white lip: my chest hurts, I want to kiss it so badly.
But I am silent. My dark mouth remains in only a half-cocked smirk. My eyes are molten when they meet his, but not in a way that implies any kind of warmth. I roll my shoulders back and feel a slow, comfortable heat ooze down my spine, unwinding like an eight day clock and falling apart at the seams until every muscle feels like it’s turning to liquid. The door opens with a gentle whuf. Warm air sweeps out from the room; over the warden’s shoulder, I can see the kind clutter so inherent to the homes of those without noble blood—stacks of papers, books with cracked spines, an oil lamp with a warped yellow glow.
It looks nothing like my room at home, and exactly like what I expected of him. Darkness sweeping in from the corners, the smell of pine needles and petrichor, the glow of his eyes like moonstone shining out from a black face and a black room. I try to measure my breath. But it hurts to hold an inhale, it hurts to do anything but look and look and look at him until my head starts ringing like a bell and fills with soft, cottony darkness, thicker than the sound of humming.
His voice cuts through: After you. I blow out a short huff of breath, and I can see it stir the fine whorl of hairs on his forehead, ruffled like wind on the sea. But I don’t argue. I don’t say anything at all. I just dip my head in a half-second gesture of surrender and brush past him, into this room that smells like wilderness and feels like sunlight, and I can’t tell if the flicker of electricity that runs across my side is Andras’ fault or mine, if my body is finally betraying me.
Either way it makes me shudder all the way down. Either way it makes my stomach churn. I turn in the middle of the room to face him; my ear is filled with the soft hissing of the snakes, agitated out of their usual sleepiness by the way I’m suddenly tenses with adrenaline. One nips the soft spot between my cheek and my neck. I flinch, and an ear flicks despite my attempts to keep still. Everyone in this room has teeth for me.
“Everything?” I repeat. My voice is strained by a derisive kind of sweetness, like I’m talking down to him but in a way I know he’ll like. I meet his gaze and narrow my eyes.
I want to hear him say it. Everything he’s done wrong. Everything he wants from me.
rage is not beautiful.
it is the ugly head of a rabid animal
foaming at the mouth,
worms in its heart.
This is a familiar ache, hunger like claws in the back of his throat, some dark, bloated thing that rears his head when those fossil-eyes bore bright holes in the shield of his skin. It is darkest of all when it feels like he is falling endlessly, like there is not enough air in the world to fill him or clear the static that's filling every part of him that used to be a coherent thought, like he is burning away to ash-- and all the pain and panic that comes with it.
Pilate breathes a sharp huff that he feels just at much as he hears. Andras follows his shape through the dark, those bright eyes just as bright in the glow of the lantern as they are in the midday sun. As the door clicks shut behind him Andras sees him edged in yellow light that pools in the cup of his chest and the ridge of his brow. He looks somehow soft, though he's all sharp angles like a canvas stretched over the frame of his bones in places. It is almost enough to make him wilt, where he is not seen, tucked into the background, safe from those prying eyes that would pull him apart if he knew.
He is almost worried, when the thought makes him shudder. Almost.
Pilate turns. Pilate looks first at the room– its uncanny shapes and its cluttered stillness, wavering in the low light– and then back at Andras. Andras sees the twist of his snakes like a ghost in the dark. He watches the silhouette of one touch Pilate's face, sharp teeth and wide jaw and those same molten eyes, and he has to swallow to keep from doing more than cracking half a smile.
Pilate flinches, just barely. It becomes a full smile. One that spreads from the crease of his mouth to the skin of his cheek to the light laughing along in the lens of his glasses. It is a smile not so unlike Pilate's own and it is not particularly chaste.
’Everything?’ Pilate prods, sweet like a shot of venom, and in spite of the silence in him, in spite of the way he remembers his legs are trembling with the effort of holding him up, a weak arc of blue light floats off his skin. It takes only this long for his smile to become a toothy snarl, as bitter and black as it's ever been, then smooth itself out again.
Pilate came to him, to the woods, in the dead of night, when it was inevitable that Andras would crawl back to Solterra on his stomach, given enough time (and he had, more than once). He knows, with more certainty than he feels most things, that all the huffing and smirking and carrying on can't change that. He only wish he knew why.
It is this and the night-dark fear, the lingering image of Pilate emptying his drink and clacking away-- the two driving forces that draw him closer, and closer, until the space between them is so small that Andras can unfold one wing and touch him in a rare moment of bravery, shuddering with the weight of it. The room is dark and cramped and quiet and Andras can hear himself breathing until he starts speaking to cover the sound.
“Mhm,” he hums, quiet enough that it is little more than a rumble in his throat. His wing is still extended, and for a moment Andras wonders if Pilate will break it, or tear it off, or something just as grave and bloody and sudden. He does not wonder why the idea doesn't surprise him-- part of him knows, just as he knows why his heart is a war drum in his chest, that it is because Pilate is as dangerous as he is beautiful. He moves to tuck his wing back against his ribs but its tips skin the floor instead.
“I am intimidated, and very selfish, and unbelievably immature.” Andras says, louder now, but almost gently. “Though I don't know why, considering, I had expected you to be far less patient... and yet, here you are.” Andras tilts his head, regarding Pilate with something uncomfortably close to admiration, full of that longing straight down to his marrow that pulls him closer still, until he can see the hot coals of Pilate's eyes, and knows now more than ever than intimidated is an understatement.
Andras smiles, the way Pilate might smile: something smug, and knowing, but not nearly as patient. His heart is a panicked bird in a panicked cage. Andras draws on all the courage left in him not to see Pilate running again, not to expect the cold stare he knows is coming, not to steel himself against the inevitable. He chuckles through his nose, eyes narrowed to match the other's. “I’d thank you, if I knew why that was.”
promise I'll be kind, but I won't stop until that boy is mine, baby, you'll be famous, chase you down until you love me
When I look at him I feel more than I have ever felt for anyone or anything else. The thing that scratches at my throat and rises in my stomach like bile is stronger than the fragile love I have for Corradh, stronger than the ache of missing my mother; stronger, even, than the mixture of rage and panic and hunger I feel when I think of Adonai, which I thought, until now, had grown as fearfully large as any emotion ever possibly could.
But one glance at the Warden—his bright eyes behind their glasses, the slash of white opening his lip, the faint rise and fall of his chest when he lets out a sharp breath—overshadows everything with ease, like Goliath over David.
I pull my mouth closed. I hold it in place until the hinges of my jaw ache with the pressure and threaten to burst. I keep my lips in a carefully-easy line, just barely turned up at the edges, and my eyes on his even when the blue-gray tint of them makes me feel physically sick, and my breath steady even when I brush past him into the crowded room and feel his feathers scrape my leg—my shoulder—my hip.
I keep it together. Hold myself closed at the seams and square my legs and force myself not to look away. Even when the walls press in, and I begin to feel smaller than I’ve ever felt. Even when my body goes warm as a fever. Even then I am a prince, carefully curated, painted into place, and motivated more than anything by the idea of looking calm in front of him when all I want to do is scream.
There are some benefits, I think to myself, of being raised well.
Andras says mhm as I gaze around the room, something between a growl and a gasp; and I can’t tell if I love or hate the way it shoots through me in one long blue electric arc, almost like his magic would. I turn anyway. In the half-dark, I can see little of him but the glint of candlelight on his glasses, the splash of white stark against his throat. A bird in a storm. “W—“
As fast as I start speaking I stop. He is touching me. On purpose.
I watch the movement as if I don’t quite believe it (which I don’t). But no, I can see it and feel it—his wing falling in a gentle arc toward me, and I watch it come down like it is an axe and I am awaiting execution, with bated breath and a body-numbing anticipation.
When he does make contact, it is lighter than I would have thought him capable of. God-breath ghosting over my shoulder. One feather, then another, then another comes to rest on my spine, at once weightless and all-consuming, and I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe without looking at him, my smile falling away to reveal the slightest hint of a snarl, my eyes burning with something between fury and desperation, wearing the brightness of both.
The wing retracts, and I feel almost as though I am falling to the floor without his touch.
“That’s easy,” I say. And my voice is suddenly hoarse, unbefitting a prince, and my throat feels thick and rough, like I might choke if I have to say what I’m about to. I chew my lip, dark-eyed, thinking.
rage is not beautiful.
it is the ugly head of a rabid animal
foaming at the mouth,
worms in its heart.
Pilate clenches his jaw hard enough that Andras sees the muscles tense and does not realize that he’s doing the same until much later. He is so stubborn, the Warden thinks. He is so stubborn and selfish and beautiful and if I do not touch him or kiss him or kill him surely I will die instead.
Here is the difference between them: Andras is haunted. His life is measured in moments of confusing and all-consuming need punctuated by extended periods of droning monotony. In the library’s great hall, in the streets of the Court, in a corner shop selling candles and incense and dyed parchment, there are spots he cannot cross without going hot and then desperately, desperately cold.
He is not a stranger to being ruled by the quick beat of his heart. He cannot tell grief from joy but he knows it like he knows the crown of sparkling, earthen scales on Pilate’s forehead, or the carefully, carefully curated line of his mouth--just tucked up in the corners, so still that it’s maddening, and tighter than the knot in Andras’ stomach.
That’s easy, Pilate says, hoarse, like he has to cough to get it out at all. Andras smiles again, and again, and again, the sort of toothy grin typical of him, a halfway predatory thing that does not quite convey just how hungry he feels. He sees now that he is not hungry, he’s starving. I can’t help it.
Andras presses his tongue to the back of his teeth to stifle a chuckle.
You are so stubborn, he thinks. And selfish. And beautiful.
And if I do not touch you, or kiss you, or kill you, surely I will die instead.
”Are you trying?” he asks, hoarse himself. The act of opening his mouth at all rims the words with that aborted laughter. ”To help it?”
Then he leans in, one motion that is quick but so painfully slow to eat up the space left between them. Andras’ heart is so loud in his ears he thinks he might go deaf. Every part of him is so tense that it hurts, it aches, and that ache does not go away when the soft skin of his nose leans against Pilate’s shoulder, or when he feels his own teeth against the back of his lips.
And it does not go away, either, when Andras thinks Oriens help me, and says, little more than a low hum against the deafening sound of his blood, rushing, ”I’m obsessed, I think.”
promise I'll be kind, but I won't stop until that boy is mine, baby, you'll be famous, chase you down until you love me
I don’t want to be here, I think, staring at him. I can’t handle it.
The omnipresent dark crawling closer from every angle. The faint flicker of his yellow candles against the bookshelves. The heat of his body melting me like I am some teenage groupie, shocked to stillness in the presence of their idol. I don’t want to be here, I think, dread rising in my throat along with a taste like bile, and when I blink, even that millisecond where my eyes are removed from the darkness of his—that less-than-a-heartbeat—makes me feel stunningly, cripplingly alone.
I don’t want to be here. But I can’t imagine being anywhere else.
The quick beat of my heart feels like drowning. My blood roars in my ears, loud-and-soft, loud-and-soft; and I can hear the way it crashes up against my chest, tides pulled by the moon, waves on the shore.
There have been many times that I feel like Ruth: heartless, cold and stony inside. (It cannot be coincidence that my mother made me in Medusa’s image, and sometimes I wonder if I was meant to be more powerful than I am. Sometimes I wonder if she meant this body for someone else. Sometimes I wonder if I was not meant to be sand. but stone—all the way through.) But this is not one of them. This is the opposite. Everything is happening at once, and heat burns behind my ears and against the curve of my throat, and darkness is bleeding into my vision from the edges in, and I am tumbling over and over and over myself into the pit of my own heart.
Boom—fast, like your throat being cut.
I know Andras is the only one of us who really crackles with electricity. But damn if I don’t feel electric, heat sputtering over every inch of my dark skin, twisting and turning between the layers of scales, making my snakes itch; and my lips curl as I try to keep it down, that urge to move or bite or say something, anything at all.
Instead, for perhaps the first time in my life, I am quiet. Silent, even. Even when Andras steps toward me, all I can hear is the raspy way my breath hitches in my throat when I make the effort to reel it in.
Are you trying? he dares me. To help it? And my mouth curls in an awkward movement; a movement that even I can’t tell is meant to be a smile or a grimace. I only know that it feels wrong. It makes the hinge in my jaw ache, a pain that radiates all the way into my skull. It makes my chest contract like it’s facing the weight of a boa constrictor. And even through those feelings, I somehow manage, dazedly, distractedly, to remain focused on the way his mouth moves when he smiles and says: I’m obsessed, I think.
And I laugh.
I break into a real smile, wide and bright and glittering; my eyes narrow with the force of it, and when that laugh bubbles to a close, I can’t help that it trails off into a smirk. Satisfaction floods me in one long dark wave of electricity, spikes me bright white and red and gold all over until I feel closer to godliness than I’ve ever felt before in my life, and oh—isn’t that saying something.
“Of course you are,” I answer, throaty, still smirking. And I know just from the way it sounds that my eyes must be dark, dark, dark, and that when I reach out and hover my mouth just an inch from his, my whole face must be flushed with rough, nearly wicked pleasure. “Why wouldn’t you be?”
rage is not beautiful.
it is the ugly head of a rabid animal
foaming at the mouth,
worms in its heart.
Oh god, he is obsessed.
So much that it hurts. So much that his legs that ache just from standing tremble under the weight of it. If he is a stone than this mass of affection mixed with desperate joy mixed with breathless dread is an entire mountain coming down on his back. Sometimes it is pebble by pebble, plinking into place as neatly as it can.
Sometimes-- like when Pilate laughs, like when a smile breaks over his face and it is enough to stagger Andras, when it is enough that he chokes on it for the blink of an eye-- it falls in fat slabs on the hills of his shoulders, his back, his hips. God, he is obsessed, more and more by the second. Pilate smiles and Andras feels too full of everything at once. Pilate smiles and Andras wishes he was dead because the force of it is catastrophic.
The dread becomes joy becomes ache becomes dread in an endless loop and it is all Andras can do to smile back without his knees giving out beneath him.
Pilate laughs like he means it. Pilate smiles like the vicious sun of the Mors and Andras holds his breath. He knows he would do anything-- absolutely anything-- if it meant Pilate would smile like that, at him, every day of his life. Even though this prince is so selfish, so stubborn, so beautiful (I will die, he thinks-- I am dying) when he says "of course you are" Andras' heart beats in time with it.
Of course I am, of course, of course, of course...
Genuine affection looks strange on his face, too large of a thing to fit in such a small, savage animal. He wants to laugh, or cry, but what comes out is some strangled, breathless, choking chuckle that sticks first in his throat and then in his teeth.
He says, "Oh my gods," and steps closer again--another barrier broken, another stride that feels like a mile, another moment where his bones seem to stick in that fear that's not clawing, it's drilling into his stomach. Andras smiles like a dare but he feels like one large jagged fault line that will either scrape against the other or fall into the sea with no way of knowing. If his magic were awake, if his legs were not weak, if he could breathe at all he would be incandescent.
But it is sleeping, or comatose, rather, and Andras thanks his rash decisions, because he thinks that to see this in full light would be to lose it forever.
Gods. Please. No.
Pilate's eyes are black gashes in the shield of his face. Andras realizes he can hear both of them breathing. He steps closer again, until the tips of his unfolded wings brush both of their ankles. They are so close he thinks he will die, and he would. He would. If Pilate asked.
Andras touches the corner of Pilate's mouth with his, lips and teeth. He touches the sharp cut of his cheek, the curve of his jaw, the columns of his neck. He has never touched something of any real value. He has never valued anything, at all. Until-- until. Why wouldn't you?
"Should I tell you why?" They are still touching. Andras is so tired, so sore, so terribly, terribly obsessed. "Or is one compliment enough for the night?"
promise I'll be kind, but I won't stop until that boy is mine, baby, you'll be famous, chase you down until you love me
Andras looks like he’s about to die.
Maybe I should be worried, but I’m not. I’m… satisfied. I look at him, at the nervously trembling line of his mouth, at the pupils blown wide in his gray gaze, how his expression is so earnest it almost looks like pain, and I think of that phrase I’ve heard so many times before: I like a look of agony because I know it’s true.
This must be true. The way he looks at me like I’m going to kill him—I think I might be the world’s best actor, and even I couldn’t fake that expression so convincingly.
Up close, I observe every inch of him. Sometimes I forget that he’s smaller than me; his wings and the halo of blue electricity that surrounds him, and perhaps in part his rage, always make him seem my size or bigger. But I see it now. I feel the few inches of height between us like I’d feel a mortal wound: when I look at him, I realize, I am looking down.
I don’t do that often. At least not in a literal sense. His eyes are the color of the sea in a storm, or the sky above it—or the blurred line between one and the other, a smudgy, foggy, smoky gray glossed over by a faint haze of pale blue. His lashes are dark and curled up thick. And the sharp black planes of his face are as deep and haunting as the Solterran night, with no stars but the crescent moon of the white on his lip, breaking up the dark.
He is beautiful, and I hate him more than I can say.
The switch flips. I don’t know what causes it. But I feel bitter and suddenly, physically sickened by the warm, soft, repulsively tender touch of the Warden’s mouth to my cheek, my jaw, my neck. It should make me melt; instead I stiffen. It should make me swoon; instead I have to stop myself from cringing sorely.
He doesn’t know me, I think. He wouldn’t touch me if he knew me.
So when he asks if I want to know, I say without stopping to think, my voice low and unusually serious: “From you, I don’t think I could handle more. Plus I’m not sure I’d believe them.”
The switch flips. I don’t know what causes it.
But I’m horrified, and I leave without even a smirk.
